My new lafite 14 AMD AI 365. Review and Linux experience

[mieh]

I bought a 14 inch lafite with Ryzen 9 ai 365 from pcspecialist. This laptop is a tonfang that is also sold by a number of resellers, which just a few of which are already offering ryzen AI series (strix point is named I believe). I ultimately decided to go with pcspecialist because their discount on no Windows license (way greater) and the 3 year warranty they offer where I'm based from (Spain). Other sellers limit to just one or two years.

A few days after the purchase it occurred to me that being a tonfang device, pcspecialist may be able to ship it without any branding (as I always prefer minimal branding on my laptops) so I contacted customer service and while they would not promise anything, they'd leave a note on my order. Once I received I was really happy to see that my request made it through!

here is my review and some pictures:

Build quality is quite good with some minor bits. Note that I also have a MacBook Pro M4 for work, and the build quality differences are considerable. I'd compare this pcspecialist laptop build quality to be similar to my old Xiaomi air 13.

Cons:

• aluminium doesn't feel too thick, which may make it prone to dents
• power button click feels cheap
• status led is located by the power button and it's a bit too bright for being in that location
• function keys appear to be limited only when holding the fn button. I haven't found a way to configure it but I suspect it's a firmware default config.
• only s2idle sleep available by the looks. Overnight sleep discharge not too bad tho with a 1-2% per hour
• ugly bios. I have yet to contact pcspecialist for asking them if they provide bios updates.

Pros

• screen is nice and bright. Quite possibly needs some calibration (in linux) as night light creates too bright colors.
• feels sturdy
• sound is decent
• mostly quiet operation
• battery life w/o any optimisations (yet) between 8 and 10 hours
• decent trackpad, but the mechanical click could be better. It doesn't bother me too much as I barely use it.

I'm using it as a linux machine (with fedora) and out of the box there are some issues with random freezes and dead keyboard on resume events. I've been able solve these with a bunch of kernel params: amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x12 amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x600 i8042.noaux acpi_osi=linux mem_sleep_default=deep
The ir camera works perfectly with https://github.com/boltgolt/howdy and the ethernet connection requires a driver as it's not yet in the upstream linux kernel. I happened to find that the driver provided by slimbook (clevo/tonfang reseller too) works perfectly here https://github.com/Slimbook-Team/slimbook-yt6801-dkms

Feel free to ask any question!

 

[BlessedSquirrel]

I bought a 14 inch lafite from Ryzen 9 ai 365. A few days after the purchase it occurred to me that being a tonfang device, pcspecialist may be able to ship it without any branding (as I always prefer minimal branding on my laptops) so I contacted customer service and while they would not promise anything, they'd leave a note on my order. Once I received I was really happy to see that my request made it through!

here is my review and some pictures:

Build quality is quite good with some minor bits. Note that I also have a MacBook Pro M4 for work, and the build quality differences are considerable. I'd compare this pcspecialist laptop build quality to be similar to my old Xiaomi air 13.

Cons:

• aluminium doesn't feel too thick, which may make it prone to dents
• power button click feels cheap
• status led is located by the power button and it's a bit too bright for being in that location
• function keys appear to be limited only when holding the fn button. I haven't found a way to configure it but I suspect it's a firmware default config.
• only s2idle sleep available by the looks. Overnight sleep discharge not too bad tho with a 1-2% per hour
• ugly bios. I have yet to contact pcspecialist for asking them if they provide bios updates.

Pros

• screen is nice and bright. Quite possibly needs some calibration (in linux) as night light creates too bright colors.
• feels sturdy
• sound is decent
• mostly quiet operation
• battery life w/o any optimisations (yet) between 8 and 10 hours
• decent trackpad, but the mechanical click could be better. It doesn't bother me too much as I barely use it.

I'm using it as a linux machine (with fedora) and out of the box there are some issues with random freezes and dead keyboard on resume events. I've been able solve these with a bunch of kernel params: amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x12 amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x600 i8042.noaux acpi_osi=linux mem_sleep_default=deep
The ir camera works perfectly with https://github.com/boltgolt/howdy and the ethernet connection requires a driver as it's not yet in the upstream linux kernel. I happened to find that the driver provided by slimbook (clevo/tonfang reseller too) works perfectly here https://github.com/Slimbook-Team/slimbook-yt6801-dkms

Feel free to ask any question!

Just wanted to say massive thank you for a fantastic in depth review, and also for the necessary workarounds you found in Linux.

I'm having intermittent issues with my Ubuntu Plucky Puffin machine freezing on the log in screen once the screen comes out of sleep (not the pc out of sleep), on a new RX 9070 XT which I have no doubt may be the issue as kernel support is still very new. Those Kernel params may be exactly the kind of thing I need, will have to investigate how to identify the necessary params required for my specific issue.

 

[_alex_]

ugly bios. I have yet to contact pcspecialist for asking them if they provide bios updates.

May I ask what do you mean by "ugly" BIOS: does it lacks some settings or the UI/UX is just not very nice? Is it possible to change various settings e.g. amount of RAM dedicated to GPU, RAM timings, undervolting, etc?